NSA Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, Utah

How much water the National Security Agency's data center at Bluffdale, in Utah County, uses was a secret until a newspaper went to court for it. The City of Bluffdale, which sells the agency its water, argued that knowing how much water the cooling systems used could help someone estimate the computing power inside, and so compromise national security.

Utah's State Records Committee voted unanimously for The Salt Lake Tribune on March 19, 2014. Ernest Rowley, the panel's representative of local government interests, said the water belonged to the public; Patricia Smith-Mansfield, the governor's designee, said releasing it would not in her opinion jeopardize the agency. Nate Carlisle, the Tribune reporter who led the fight, said the paper wanted an educated discussion in Utah about what the facility's presence meant, in the second driest state in the country, where the city sells the agency the water and its taxpayers have an interest in knowing what it earns.

Before it opened, the estimates were already large: KSL reported in July 2013 that the center could require as many as 1.7 million gallons of water a day, and the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District's chief engineer, Alan Packard, said it was planning for 1,000 to 2,000 acre-feet a year.

It has not gotten smaller: the site used more than 126 million gallons between October 2024 and September 2025, about 390 acre-feet, enough to meet the indoor needs of nearly 800 Utah households for a year.

Utah legislated in 2026 to make the rest of the industry publish the same thing: HB 76, brought by Rep. Jill Koford, requires a new large data center to report where its water comes from and how much it withdraws each year, with the figures published online. Bluffdale city manager Mark Reid said the government funded $7 million in infrastructure for the data center, plus $5 million more that lets a third of its water be recycled for the city park and lawns.